What effects have you seen on your SEO client sites after the recent Google update? The algorithm certainly caused panic in a few areas in past weeks, with many complaining about lack of relevancy within the SERPS and cached data being somewhat unreliable. Surely change is good though isn’t it ? Where would we all […]
Social media marketing is not just something you can tap into, well not with any level of impact anyway. You really need someone experienced in the field if you are about to embark on a social media advertising campaign. Social media sites don’t live forever though and I think that is something lots of marketing […]
What will Yahoo be worth at the end of all the deals being put on the table by such as Microsoft? Now talks are of a non full buyout from Microsoft who are still pondering the deal. Stockholder values are being maximised it what we are being told, be we have to ask what […]
Kevin Lee is the CEO of the search engine marketing firm Didit and an engaging speaker at many search conferences. While he loves his PPC, he also sells SEO videos on his personal blog. We recently chatted back and forth via email, and decided it would be a good idea to do an interview. Here are the questions I asked Kevin and his answers.
A recent report from a SEM firm highlighted that 55% of their clicks from the search portion of Yahoo! Search Marketing do not come from Yahoo! Search, but from syndication partners. Does that number sound high to you?
Yes, based on the last time I looked. I don’t have the latest HTTP referrer analysis handy, but I recall that the last time I looked the percentages varied rather dramatically by industry and keyword due to the fact that many of the domain traffic sources end up being lumped in as search. However, I’m not sure if that SEM had content turned on to get YPN traffic.
Why hasn’t Yahoo! made it easier to opt out of syndication like Google has?
Yahoo has made some small progress in this direction but for the main search function it may have resisted the opt-out functionality for some combination of the following:
It’s my opinion that Yahoo should certainly dedicate additional technology resources to the search-side of the business.
Yahoo! has the syndication that can’t be opted out from, and by default Google opts advertisers into everything. And then there is broad match which might be a bit broad for some advertisers. It seems the networks almost have an “ignorance tax” which hurt many small advertisers who do not know any better. Each cool new feature they add works as a bonus for firms like Didit, while working against people new to the field. At what budget scale does it make sense to start looking for outsourced help?
I agree that the current ecosystem has an ignorance tax. However, one could make the same argument about nearly every form of marketing. Paid search can of course get particularly complex when one looks at all the targeting, segmenting and bidding levers available. As to the outsourcing issue. I think many marketers and agencies consider the idea of outsourced search a binary decision. It’s actually a continuum, more like the areas of legal work. A mid-to-large firm may have in-house legal counsel yet often still outsources certain work based on a variety of factors including how critical the issue is as well as whether they think their in-house team can handle it from either a production or skill level basis. Search is the same way. Some of our clients outsource everything to us, others use our managed technology option which we offer only to specific marketers where we believe that their in-house team can handle production and most of the strategy.
So, I’d urge any marketers that feels like they are missing either opportunities or perhaps running a wasteful campaign due to strategic issues, inferior campaign management technology, poor analytics or simply the fact that they can’t get the vast amounts of production work done to investigate partnerships that will help them achieve maximum overall profitability.
Also, when thinking about outsourcing, consider that technology can help ease a big chunk of the production burden, but someone still has to do the blocking and tackling within a campaign. In nearly every case, you get what you pay for (or less than you paid for), but rarely does one get more than one is paying for when it comes to production work.
In a number of past interviews you have highlighted that advertising has the ability to drive search volume. Does advertising that drives search volume typically drive it mainly for brand related queries? Does the value of the average search end up increasing or decreasing when search volume is build via advertising?
Advertising, PR and marketing of all sorts generally spikes brand keyword traffic to the largest degree. However, depending on the message of the advertising and the industry category, it may drive a significant lift in generic volume. As you might expect, that results in some really interesting opportunities to take advantage of volatility in keyword-search volume across a broad spectrum. It also make media mix modeling of search particularly tricky since you may have to add in external variables other than your own marketing/advertising.
Generally there aren’t major changes in the conversion rates when search was stimulated by advertising vs other factors. The reality is that most search was stimulated by some external factor. People don’t sit bolt upright at 3AM saying to themselves that they need to search for an “Alaskan cruise vacation.”
Speaking of brand, when is it beneficial to bid on brand related queries? What bid strategies make sense on brand related queries if the brand already dominates the organic search results?
Thus far in all the experiments and test we’ve conducted brand bidding is still worth doing even when the organic result is #1. Often to get the highest combined ROI the offer/landing page needs to be different. With universal search and the continued evolution of personalized search results within Google there’s an increasing likelihood that brand bidding will be a net-positive even after cannibalization if factored in. The increase in ROI and profit is more dramatic if others are bidding on the brand, but surprisingly even in instances where the brand is the only paid advertiser, it still generally is worth bidding. However, it’s something I’d always recommend structuring testing and experimentation around.
John Battelle believes that “brands are conversations,” and is pushing something he calls conversational marketing. Do you think this movement will make a big impact on the web? Have you used the strategy for any of your clients?
I’m not sure I’d call it a “movement” more than any other scheme or analysis of marketing is a movement. Consumers have conversations about brands. Conversations about brands, problems and solutions stimulate search behavior. One can of course try to be present within conversations directly (which is a non-trivial problem), try to insert one’s brand into existing conversations (dangerous if it is done wrong) or simply wait patiently in the SERP for the curiosity of the consumer to manifest itself in search. I’m going overboard to make a point, but, the challenge for the marketer is determining the marginal value that any conversation has in moving the consumer closer to a purchase. That challenge holds true for any marketing or advertising. Increases in early brand metrics only matter if the consumer either purchases themselves or influences others to purchase.
In a number of your columns you have talked about search and the buying cycle. What strategies do you find most effective for early stage searches? How do those strategies compare to brand keywords and other keywords with more purchase intent?
Even on late stage keywords, clearly the vast majority of searchers don’t convert, at least not online. Other than a couple of instances with brand keywords, I can’t recall conversion rates even approaching 50%. So, the first hurdle for the search marketer is to get the CMO on-board with the idea of targeting a larger pool of non-immediate converters. It still makes sense to take every incremental marketing dollar and go after the next segment of converters. It’s trick is to understand the marginal value of each click based on conversion profiles and then you’ll know the best way to work back the buying cycle toward awareness and consideration while still capturing those consumers who were open to converting in the near term. Clearly the messaging in ads and landing pages may need to migrate a bit as one moves away from simply harvesting demand to helping influence the consumer during earlier stages of the buying cycle.
For a person short on budget running a small campaign, are the tools provided by the search ad networks adequate? Are there any other budget analytics or PPC tools that are surprisingly good? Would you suggest trusting sending your conversion data to Google Analytics?
Even for small marketers, I think one can make the case for the value of third-party analytics and technology. There are clearly reasons why one might not want the advertising seller to know the conversion data, but the issue is even broader than that. In a world where one of the next big frontiers is behavioral targeting, do you really want to give the traffic sellers BT data that might be exploitable at some point down the road?
Several firms are attacking the small marketer market with respect to search. One promising upcoming candidate is Clickable.com. They are technically still in beta I believe, but their mission is admirable.
A lot of affordable competitive research tools (like Compete.com, KeyCompete, Keyword Spy) have been launched in the past few years. Have you compared any of these to the higher priced services? Are these competitive research tools giving smaller players a chance, or are they only working to consolidate traffic for the largest market players?
We license the raw comScore data and have built internal tools and reports that have been quite valuable. I’ve experimented with many of the other services and the biggest problem with most of them for smaller marketers is that as one moves into the tail, data validity drops. So, ironically some of these tools are more useful for larger marketers than smaller ones.
comScore data has shown Google has been displaying ads against a smaller set of their total search queries over the last year. Does that trend surprise you? Might it go the other direction at some point?
There’s no point in showing ads if the ads aren’t sufficiently relevant. However as all of us know, Google uses both the carrot and the stick to drive marketers towards higher relevance in the PPC portion of the SERPS. As marketers build out content and ads to take advantage of this fact, it is quite conceivable that the ratio of paid to organic results could reverse itself and we see both more ads and more ads showing up above the organic results.
Have you found business models that do not do well with search? Or businesses that have done better than expected? What are some key signs and metrics for knowing if a business model works well with search?
Arbitrage doesn’t work as well as it used to. At some level of scale, one can get almost any business to work, but doing well requires that you have some advantages in your business over the competition. After all, economically speaking once everyone is making rational bid decisions (which may not happen for a while) if your competition have huge cost or profitability advantages over you even the best bidding strategies will have to cede them top position in many cases due to their inherent advantages.
In this video interview with Sage Lewis you talk about how with scale it is easy to break through many efficiency plateaus. What are some of the most common issues holding back new advertisers (or old advertisers with broken strategy)?
Ahh, the old logo and the frog. I miss them sometimes.
The most common thing I see is a failure to accurately predict their missed opportunities. Waste can be found in campaigns fairly easily but missed opportunities are difficult to quantify. So, they are usually significantly underestimated. As you well know, this is a challenge with organic SEO as well. Lack of the right technology of course cripples the marketer from executing on many of the strategies that would bring increase profit and scale. Lack of sufficient production capability is also a huge hurdle. If you never get around to the account reorgs ad testing, landing page testing or the keyword expansions you’ll continue to miss those opportunities.
Lack of education as you pointed out ends up also being a huge issue for new advertisers.
The Google AdWords blog had a post titled Websites that may merit a low landing page quality score. Some thin affiliates have been slapped with $10 minimum bids on every keyword, and can not profitably buy any traffic from Google. It seems Google is trying to clean up their ad network on some fronts, and yet they showed my wife an ad for cheating lonely housewives. If Google openly discriminates in their pricing models based on how well they like the business model of the advertiser, are they endorsing the ads that they allow to run for months and years? That lonely cheating wives ad was publicly referenced last November and the ad is still running.
I think Google continues to put most of its relevance efforts into its own SERP. If some irrelevant ads show up in the contextual network, unless the publisher complains, there’s not really damage to the Google brand among consumers.
As an SEO, in my experience, the complexity of the ranking algorithms and the amount of money needed to reliably rank in Google keeps increasing the opportunity cost of ranking in the organic search results (unless there is a healthy dose of public relations, brand building, promotion, community participation, and traditional marketing in that SEO mix). In a couple of past interviews you (at least to some extent) equated SEO to spam (or at least used both words in close proximity). Do you still think that SEOs have control over Google or do you see Google gaining more leverage in the relationship?
I’ve probably been taken out of context somewhat. However, I firmly believe that in the log run, Google, Yahoo and MSFT will police both their organic and their paid search listings (not so much contextual and behavioral) to assure relevance. That means that if you start to engage in SEO and you couldn’t make a credible argument as to why you in fact are the most relevant to a room full of strangers then you probably will get booted from the SERPS even if you used black-hat SEO to successfully manipulate yourself to the top. It’s not so much about leverage, as it is about tools Google could conceivably use to gauge relevance that they may not be using now. For example, the toolbars you see proliferating could watch post-click behavior and that could be combined with click-back percentages (those who abandon the top-listed site returning to the SERP) to flush out results that are not particularly relevant in comparison to others.
Marketers without the rankings their content deserves should absolutely invest in SEO. Those with the ability to create additional great content that ranks well should similarly invest. However, the one key thing is that when it comes to SEO, as with Public Relations, expectations need to be reasonable. If an SEO practitioner (in-house or outsourced) promises results that Matt Cutts would likely grade as poor quality SERPs well, then even in the unlikely instance where success was attained with white-hat methods there is clear risk that those results will be temporary.
One of my favorite SEO strategies is to use PPC to drive traffic to key pages for link building. What are your favorite PPC strategies that are rarely talked about, and do you use an SEO techniques to augment your paid search campaigns?
Actually your strategy is interesting, because it partially explains why relevant sites in the organic results often remain there. They get lots of traffic, some of those visitors blog, and even if one out of 1000 visitors links-in, that process creates a really sticky feedback loop for PageRank generation.
People rarely talk about geotargeting and dayparting. Both are favorites of mine. I’m a big fan of any segmentation analysis and cluster modeling that helps marketers cherry-pick the very best clicks from the stream of possibilities.
I advise clients to train their webmasters on SEO basics and best practices because if they are in fact relevant, perhaps some of their existing visitor stream will blog and can help cement better organic position.
Didit is one of the most well known and respected brands in the PPC space. What were some of the keys to growing into your market position?
Being around for a dozen years doesn’t hurt. However, putting the client’s success first is really the key. That forces us to innovate and also puts the pressure on us to provide the right level of service given the relationship. Many people also seem to appreciate our passion for the industry. We do a ton of speaking, writing and are involved in trade associations.
PPC ad networks, like search engines, have many publish guidelines. Some of which are loosely enforced, and some may erode profit to follow. Have you ever recommended to a client that they ignore such policies? Have you ever fought a search engine’s policies and got them to change them?
We encourage marketers who have an issue with a guideline to understand the reason he guideline exists. That helps predict the likelihood of enforcement if something is perhaps in the grey zone and a policy might end up being tested. Similarly, that same understanding is key is attempting to get a policy changed or an exception made.
Thanks Kevin!
Since buying out Yahoo! seemed too expensive, Microsoft is back again with another offer. Microsoft’s Statement:
In light of developments since the withdrawal of the Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business. Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo! an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo! but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo! Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo! at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo! or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft or with other third parties.
There of course can be no assurance that any transaction will result from these discussions.
From AllThingsD:
The software giant would not give details, but sources at both companies said it involved Microsoft buying Yahoo’s search business and the ad business related to text-based ads.
Kevin Johnson also posted an internal Microsoft memo on News.com.
What do Yummie Tummie, Bingo and Driving Lessons all have in common? Answer… TV Coverage!
There’s no doubt about it TV Coverage gets you loads of website traffic. Yet another one of our SEO clients gets its product highlighted, this time on Oprah. Yummie Tummie (Yummy Tummy) gets its debut and HerRoom should see their traffic […]
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One of the questions I get asked frequently is “which search conferences should I attend”. Seeing as conferences end up costing you between $3500-$5000 a pop when you include travel, lodging and meals I thought I’d share my experience.
Year 1
if you’ve absolutely never been to search conference before start with one of the smaller shows […]
Earlier this week we had our IMNY monthly meet-up and our member Dani Horowitz was nice enough to host the event at her bowling alley Dani’s Strike Zone in Elmont NY. I have to say for bowling alley the place was pretty cool. Nice and clean, good food, and a huge party room. So big […]
I love a get rich quick system. Why? Because they always work !!
I’m looking at the Casino system where you bet on red and keep doubling up until you win.
It’s call the Martingale system and it’s such a simple system…. It is based on the probability of only losing so many times in a row […]
Amazon just created MP3 clip widgets that pay 10% payout on MP3 downloads. You can create a list of your favorites as content, while displaying ads. Those who run large communities may be able to make a decent income selling culture.
If you are a member of our community I wrote a post about why I think Google Friend Connect is a bad idea for most web publishers.
Andrew Johnson has a good post on why Yahoo! as a content company is a failing strategy. While Google and Amazon are expanding in many directions, Yahoo! is forced to contract due to their high editorial costs.
Mozilla Corporation may create a service around aggregating usage data. Yet another great example of giving away something and building value around it.
There’s lots of hand wringing among publishers about duplicate content, and how other people who are authorized to syndicate, and scrapers who aren’t often outrank the original source, when Google gets it wrong. Here’s an example in action.
I have an agreement with Web Pro News, they can pick and choose any of my content that […]
So I was reading the SEW blog today and came across an article from Frank Watson about Google allowing advertisers for the word vodka. While I think this might be bit of a weak argument, I’m always up for poking Google with a stick. However I think there something else to be learned from the […]
Danny Sullivan mentioned Efficient Frontier research which stated that 55% of Yahoo! Search ad clicks from last week were from syndication partners.
If you normalize the above Yahoo! numbers you will see that search clicks convert nearly twice as well as their syndication traffic does.
Imagine how ugly those numbers were before both Google and Yahoo! aggressively fought click arbitrage. Yahoo! let advertisers take the shaft for years and years, and only started caring this year after Microsoft’s offer to buy them out.
What type of clicks are likely to be driven by arbitrage and other syndication partners? Arbitragers are more likely to go after high value keywords, thus driving down their value. Buying a valuable keyword like “mortgage” on Google costs much more than it does on Yahoo!.
From Yahoo! Search Marketing’s keyword tool (Yahoo! Search Marketing account required)
I did not enter bid prices in the above tools. Those were the default bid prices the tools suggest for mortgage. The difference in click cost is an indication of how much Yahoo! is undermining the value of their own traffic to prop up syndication partners that funnel dirty traffic through the Yahoo! Search Marketing ad network. Even when I slid the Yahoo! tool all the way to the right it said the estimated click cost was $4.98 - less than 1/3 of Google’s suggested price.
Yahoo! has to sell 3 mortgage clicks to make as much as Google makes from 1, but Yahoo! sells a couple of those clicks through syndication partners which keep most of the ad revenue.
Because Yahoo! makes it hard to opt out of search syndication they are essentially paying shoddy syndication partners 70 to 80% payout for arbitrage that builds volume, but destroys the value of Yahoo! Search.
Put another way, a Yahoo! click for mortgage is worth the same $15 that it costs on Google, but it goes for less than $5 because Yahoo! forces advertisers to eat junk traffic too. If Yahoo! virtually killed off their syndication partnerships (at least all but the cleanest ones) their short term revenue might decrease, but their click values & click prices would sharply increase.
Yahoo! mentioned the possibility of syndicating Google ads if the Google ads paid more, but if they do that then Google gets Yahoo!’s best inventory while Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers buy random mystery meat traffic. What exposure do you get from a Yahoo! Search Marketing ad account if your ads do not appear on Yahoo!? Sounds a lot like Looksmart to me.
Yahoo! already has less traffic and lower quality traffic than Google. If they outsource their best traffic to Google savvy marketers will quickly talk about how Yahoo! has low quality and you should just advertise with Google. The perception of market decay and market whispers will only accelerate the decay. When it comes time for Yahoo! to renew with Google they would have lost most of their leverage.
Once again Yahoo! may find a way to pump their short term numbers, but it is not a strategy they should try building their business around. The first step to restoring value to their search results should be making it easy for advertisers to opt out of ad syndication. If they syndicate Google AdWords most advertisers should just opt out of Yahoo! all-together.
Ok this isn’t one of my tools, but it’s pretty dam neat, for years I have had a in house system plugged into the DAC in the UK great names drop all the time and grabbing them for Branding is just awesome, things Like Zippy.co.uk and Moop.co.uk even id the search engines have never seem […]
So here’s a new tool for all you twitter people called Live Twittering be sure to check out my event How to Perpetuate Internet Celebrity
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Google Hijacks are back not only the 301 but the 302 hijack, frickin awesome hey..
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When you view satellite images in Google Maps you can see the building, however I just noticed you can also see the building outlines in standard view. For example here’s the Long Beach Westin Hotel where SMX local was held. Look at the building behind the letter A. You can see a curved building which […]
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